How one Red Bank limousine company flourished for a half-century in a bumpy transportation marketplace

Roger Somers got his start in the transportation industry in the 1960s, running a taxicab service while still in high school.

“My father Roger and his brother Don became business partners and drove two checkered cabs in the Monmouth County area,” noted his son Eddie Somers, who currently serves as president of Arrow Limousine in Red Bank, the company his dad built more than 50 years ago.

“They would work 16-hour days, driving and dispatching from an eight-by-eight office in the Red Bank train station that barely had room to fit a chair,” said Somers. “They bought their first formal car in 1967, both really hustled to make this business a success, and so two taxis grew very quickly to a whole fleet. ”

In 1970, the brothers bought a larger space on Oakland Street directly across from their original location. The new site was almost an acre of land, one that allowed Arrow to stretch its legs. Fifteen years later, when the company had outgrown that space, it purchased a new facility and moved to its current location on South Pearl Street.